Myelination, which is the production of the myelin sheath, can be viewed as a morphological criterion of the functional maturity of neural conduction in the brain. Cerebral myelination begins before birth, and is not completed until late in adolescence.
The assessment of cerebral myelination is useful for a number of functions. Cerebral myelination at various life stages may be observed and monitored. Additionally, a number of neurological diseases, where the loss of myelin slows or blocks nerve conduction, may be diagnosed, monitored, and be subject to prognostic assessment through observing and measuring brain and spinal cord myelination. Such diseases include multiple sclerosis (MS), brain trauma, stroke, and many other conditions.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a widely used medical imaging modality that provides soft-tissue differentiation to assess cerebral myelination in a subject in vivo. However, clinical MRI scanners, especially the superconducting magnet and magnetic field gradient hardware of MRI scanners, are too costly to use in population studies or in low-resource healthcare facilities.